“... at the speech day of one of Magdalen’s schools and had regaled the boys with a history of the major benefactors of the college (and thus of the school), showing that all of them had acquired their wealth by foul means and had had enough left over to buy themselves indulgences through their benefaction: the moral being that if you hear that ‘crime never ...”

“... with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them bought heavily into Rockwell. The new offer ‘A Young Girl’s Dream’ is now available at £12.45 and ...”

“... the record straight about him. He has followed Botham’s astonishing 1985 season through every major match, describing and assessing each achievement. No one is better qualified to do that. For my money, Keating is the country’s top sports writer by a long distance (and there are many other good ones). He writes pretty well about any sport, but cricket ...”

“... women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is her decision to draw so little on the imaginative literature of the time. Simple and obvious questions ask themselves. Why is there so large a gap between the depressed condition of women apparently prescribed by sermons and ...”

“... a standard of living conspicuously above that of the working people whose welfare was their major concern. This ‘wearied and excited’ Beatrice’s ‘poor little brain’ particularly at the time of the move from Hampstead to Westminster when she had to decide on furniture for the new house. ‘It is somewhat softening to contend that you need ...”

“... fashion they celebrate collective traditions while legitimating competitive struggle. The major party Conventions mark the midway stage of the election. And so, while sounding full of fight and confident of victory, the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election ...”

“... A subtler, and more economical, exercise in revisionism was performed by the Melbourne historian John Hirst in Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Hirst studied the early history of New South Wales, intent on understanding how a penal colony had changed into a free society. As he stripped away the anti-transportation campaigners’ caricatures and ...”

“... disappointingly, to be just a desire to have even more money. Buchan offers a fascinated sketch of John Law, who for five hundred days or so ‘ruled France more completely than its absolute monarchs’. During this period, in the early 18th century, he controlled the country’s foreign trade and its national debt, as well as about half of what is now the ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... fact: the mind prefers narratives to numbers.Kahneman and Tversky’s research began to have a major impact outside psychology after the publication in 1979 of their work on ‘prospect theory’. There they argued that people were more concerned with change than with current states – with gaining and losing money rather than having a particular level of ...”

“... striking departure from conventional fiction writing is Quin’s use of quotation, which becomes a major, if invisible strand in Tripticks but appears first in Three when S writes, ‘All afternoon surrounded, exchanging newspapers. I came across the following …’ and follows it with two pages of almost verbatim quotation from a 1966 article about the ...”